Top 100 Herzog Quotes
#1. I have to shoot without any breaks. I yell at Herzog and hit him. I have to fight for every sequence. I wish Herzog would catch the plague, more than ever.
Klaus Kinski
#2. May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.
Werner Herzog
#3. Has Werner Herzog ever said anything that wasn't true? What a brilliant fountain of wisdom. Everything he touches I'm just fascinated by.
Dan Gilroy
#5. Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog
Pamela Paul
#6. Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing.
Ottessa Moshfegh
#7. Herzog abandoned this theme with characteristic abruptness
Saul Bellow
#8. On working with director Werner Herzog: I have to shoot without any breaks. I yell at Herzog and hit him. I have to fight for every sequence. I wish Herzog would catch the plague.
Klaus Kinski
#9. I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.
Ava DuVernay
#10. There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him.
Finn Jones
#11. South Africa had very poor repertory distribution. I didn't find out about Akira Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Werner Herzog until I got to the U.K.
Richard Stanley
#12. Pretty much everyone on my iPod, I'd like to be friends with. But I'd say that the main two that I'd love to get into a conversation with, are Werner Herzog and Graham Hancock.
Finn Jones
#13. I pretended not to understand. One of life's hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow. I think I succeeded, thought Herzog.
Saul Bellow
#14. In my life, I wanted to meet certain people. I never met Charlie Chaplin, but I met Werner Herzog.
Philippe Petit
#15. If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Saul Bellow
#16. I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog.
Werner Herzog
#17. There were people who believed Herzog was rather simple, that his humane feelings were childish. That he had been spared the destruction of certain sentiments as the pet goose is spared the axe.
Saul Bellow
#18. Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it.
Whitey Herzog
#19. Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision.
Werner Herzog
#20. There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.
Werner Herzog
#21. The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.
Werner Herzog
#22. As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.
Brad Herzog
#23. I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.
Werner Herzog
#24. You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.
Werner Herzog
#25. There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.
Werner Herzog
#26. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Werner Herzog
#27. The way we have been playing, I might tell my players not to cross the picket line (umpire strike of 1979).
Whitey Herzog
#28. The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.
Werner Herzog
#29. I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.
Werner Herzog
#30. The only way to make money as a manager is to win in one place, get fired and hired somewhere else.
Whitey Herzog
#31. It is only through writing that I become myself
Werner Herzog
#32. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.
Werner Herzog
#33. If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
Werner Herzog
#34. I work very fast and steadily, and I don't hardly ever notice that I'm working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.
Werner Herzog
#36. What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.
Werner Herzog
#37. I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.
Werner Herzog
#38. The chicken's still dancing
the chicken won't stop
Sarah Kane
#39. I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.
Werner Herzog
#40. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
Werner Herzog
#41. If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn't matter whether you're bold or cowardly, or whether you're stupid or intelligent. Doesn't get you anywhere.
Werner Herzog
#42. On the one hand X is true, but on the other hand, Y is true," Harry S. Truman is reported to have muttered in frustration, "Get me a one-armed economist!
Hal Herzog
#43. To receive many blessings, read to your children from the womb to the tomb.
Joyce Herzog
#44. Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
Werner Herzog
#45. There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.
Werner Herzog
#46. The only thing bad about winning the pennant is that you have to manage the All-Star Game the next year. I'd rather go fishing for three days.
Whitey Herzog
#47. I'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to film making. Maybe there's also another alternative, that's walking on foot.
Werner Herzog
#48. Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.
Werner Herzog
#50. In overstepping our limitations, in touching the extreme boundaries of man's world, we have come to know something of its true splendor,
Maurice Herzog
#51. Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
Werner Herzog
#52. These people were smiling because they were where they wanted to be. They understood that life is too short for what-ifs and complications. Life, they found, can be as simple as reading the wind.
Brad Herzog
#53. I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
Werner Herzog
#54. Without dreams we would be cows in a field, and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.
Werner Herzog
#55. If, as has been postulated before, heroism happens when courage meets circumstance, what if the circumstances are mundane?
Brad Herzog
#56. Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.
Werner Herzog
#57. Regarding school vs. homeschool
If it works, send them there!
If it doesn't, don't import it.
Joyce Herzog
#58. I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.
Werner Herzog
#59. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
Werner Herzog
#60. I'm a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done.
Werner Herzog
#61. We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
Werner Herzog
#62. I am torn between the beauty of the natural world, which you see all around us, and the idea that some dumb tornado could blow a telephone pole onto my sweet Camaro.
Werner Herzog
#63. What the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors, and relationships with the animals in our lives- the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat- are, likewise, more complicated than we thought.
Hal Herzog
#64. I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.
Werner Herzog
#65. I'm not very eager to sit and look at my films all the time.
Werner Herzog
#66. You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.
Werner Herzog
#67. I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.
Werner Herzog
#68. Vesco was always on the trail in search of money.
Arthur Herzog
#69. Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative.
Werner Herzog
#70. We need three kinds of pitching: left handed, right handed, and relief.
Whitey Herzog
#71. You sweat out the free agent thing in November then you make the trades in December. Then you struggle to sign the guys left in January and in February I get down to sewing all the new numbers on the uniforms.
Whitey Herzog
#72. I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters.
Werner Herzog
#73. But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.
Werner Herzog
#74. I love nature, but against my better judgment.
Werner Herzog
#75. Perhaps elements like tenacity and humility combine to form a heroic compound.
Brad Herzog
#76. There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance.
Werner Herzog
#78. Once in a while I come across a director who hasgrown up thousands of miles from me, and the work touches me.Through these issues/50/images I am connected and something is illuminated.And I know then that I am not alone.
Werner Herzog
#79. Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.
Werner Herzog
#80. Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.
Werner Herzog
#81. If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.
Werner Herzog
#82. If you're purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn't illuminate.
Werner Herzog
#83. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
Werner Herzog
#84. I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!
Werner Herzog
#85. Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.
Werner Herzog
#86. Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, 'I would plant an apple tree today.' This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.
Werner Herzog
#87. I asked my Greek chorus about this sort of hero: the Underappreciated Personification of Resolve.
Brad Herzog
#88. Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.
Werner Herzog
#89. The rules are changed now, there's not any way to build a team today. It's just how much money you want to spend. You could be the world champions and somebody else makes a key acquisition or two and you're through.
Whitey Herzog
#90. 'Annapurna' is a sort of novel. It's a novel, but a true novel.
Maurice Herzog
#91. It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.
Werner Herzog
#92. I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour.
Werner Herzog
#93. When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.
Werner Herzog
#94. I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with.
Werner Herzog
#95. Scientists have reported that elephants grieve their dead, monkeys perceive injustice and cockatoos like to dance to the music of the Backstreet Boys.
Hal Herzog
#96. James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.
Werner Herzog
#97. You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.
Werner Herzog
#99. What counts aren't the number of double plays, but the ones you should have had and missed.
Whitey Herzog
#100. Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.
Werner Herzog
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